Onboarding, Education, and Experimentation

Customer onboarding is commonly misinterpreted as simply teaching customers how to use a platform. What many companies are missing, is that customer success is determined by the user not only knowing how to use features but also, understanding why they should use it.

Adam Avramescu, Head of Customer Education at Optimizely spoke at Pendomonium about the importance of effective onboarding for SaaS growth. Avramescu opened with a study that evaluated why SaaS customers churn. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the customer service or even product performance that contributed the most to churn. It was poor customer onboarding.

Why do they need it?

In the SaaS model, it becomes critical for companies to understand this gap. With shorter subscription timeframes, easier installation processes, and an overwhelming number of options for customers, it’s much easier for a user to get rid of a service simply because they don’t know how to use it.

“We need to educate people on not just how to use our product, but quite frankly that they need the product. And what they’d even do without a product.”

He points out that effective onboarding is not just teaching people how to use your platform, but adapting a strategy to fit each customer’s needs. This will allow for customers at all stages — early adopter and beyond —to experience success with a platform.

Optimizely uses a combination of tools to provide a fully equipped customer onboarding strategy for users. They use Pendo’s guide and segmentation capabilities to ensure each user has a unique and relevant onboarding experience.